Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World, Kristie Patricia Flannery, 2024, University of Pennsylvania Press
China’s growing influence in Latin America has been elevated into an almost existential threat by the US, which appears to be more confused with every year that passes about its place on the world stage.
Not only has Chinese state investment in energy and infrastructure increased dramatically in recent years, the country is catching up as South America’s largest trading partner—raising concerns in Washington about the implications for its traditional leverage.
There is little doubt that Beijing is using its growing profile to pursue geopolitical goals—not least to isolate Taiwan by throwing money at Central American states that break off diplomatic ties with a territory China covets.
And it is probably reasonable for US foreign policy thinktanks to panic about the security implications of this strategy, as well as to hype up the potential economic shocks faced by Latin America as ties based on debt and deficits are placed at risk should China’s economy tank.
But what all this US discomfort really demonstrates, first and foremost, is the poorly concealed imperial reflex behind American calculations.
Washington fears “losing” Latin America, which it continues to regard as its backyard in the modern hues of the Monroe Doctrine.
Second, it confirms the sheer hypocrisy that has always characterised American relations with its southern neighbours: everything Washington accuses Beijing of doing—creating debt dependency, bolstering authoritarian regimes, damaging democracy—it has done itself.
Neither of these observations are a surprise, but the real question posed by China’s soft-power offensive in Latin America, and one that the US will never ask itself, is simple: why shouldn’t Beijing be allowed to strengthen its relationships in this region in the same way Washington has for a century?
Answering this is complex but important, and to do so we might begin with history—a reading of which very quickly reveals the black hole of ignorance about Latin America’s links with Asia that has enabled the US to tap so easily into racist tropes about alien incursion.
In historical terms alone, China has as great—if not greater—grounds for kinship with Hispanic America than the Anglo-European world upon which US hegemony is based as the upstart heir to Spanish colonialism.
China’s ties to the region date back to the sixteenth century—long before the US was a twinkle in the eye of the founding fathers—when the Manila Galleon trade route enabled the exchange of porcelain, silk, and spices between China and New Spain.
Indeed, Spain’s Asian empire has largely been airbrushed from history—but as Kristie Patricia Flannery reminds us in this book it was the Iberian dreams of conquering Asia that ultimately led to landfall in what became the Americas.
Columbus’s discovery of the American continent during his voyage to Asia was accidental, and meant that the Spanish Crown’s campaigns to conquer Atlantic and Pacific colonies would thereafter advance as simultaneous enterprises.
Thence the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan serving the Spanish monarchs reached the Philippine islands—in 1521, the same year that Hernan Cortés conquered the Mexica in Tenochtitlan.
The ensuing sixteenth-century wars of conquest to expand Spanish rule deeper into the Americas coincided with multiple transpacific expeditions to conquer maritime Asia, with Miguel López de Legazpi establishing the first outpost in the Philippines, then relocating the capital of Spain’s nascent Asian empire to Manila to take advantage of its established trade with Chinese merchants.
This relationship between Asia and Spain’s new territories would prove critical both to the evolution of what would become Latin America, but also modern Europe.
Galleons sailed between Manila and Acapulco in Mexico yearly for the next 250 years, and hence scholars have called what is now the capital of the Philippines the birthplace of globalisation—and a key progenitor in the evolution of mercantile capitalism—because of this direct maritime connection.
While Flannery’s book focuses upon colonialism and piracy in the Asian archipelago, its insights go beyond the borders of the Philippines to the trajectory of globalisation and European imperial expansion. As the author notes, there is a very strong argument for more connected histories of colonial Latin Asia and colonial Latin America.
We can only surmise that historians are playing catch-up because the transatlantic Euro-American narrative has so comprehensively fashioned—and continues to dictate—Latin American historiography.
The author’s principal argument is that the threat of piracy—practised initially by the Chinese, and then by “Moro” pirates from the Islamic maritime states in the Southern Philippine islands and across the Sulu Sea—shaped the evolution of Spanish colonial rule in this region.
This threat forced agents of the Spanish empire to forge coalitions with Asian states and leaders of Indigenous and Chinese communities which would subsequently demonstrate remarkable fidelity to a European empire.
So in this sense, piracy ultimately influenced the survival of Spanish rule in its Pacific territories—rule that ultimately ended in 1898 when the US took control of the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War, displacing one empire with another.
Or should that be: one form of piracy with another?
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Categories: Asia Pacific, China, Europe, International, Mexico, North America, Spain, United States